Participatory and Spatially Explicit Assessment to Envision the Future of Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Scenarios on Selected Ecosystem Services in Southwestern Ghana.

Settlement expansion and commercial agriculture affect landscape sustainability and ecosystem service provision. Integrated landscape approaches are promoted to negotiate trade-offs between competing land uses and their reconciliation. Incorporating local perceptions of landscape dynamics as basis for such negotiations is particularly relevant for sub-Saharan Africa, where most people depend on natural ecosystems for livelihoods and well-being. This study applied participatory scenario building and spatially explicit simulation to unravel perceptions of the potential impact of rubber and settlement expansion on the provision of selected ecosystem services in southwestern Ghana under a business-as-usual scenario. We collected data in workshops and expert surveys on locally relevant ecosystem services, their indicator values, and the probable land-use transitions. The data was translated into an assessment matrix and integrated into a spatially explicit modeling platform, allowing visualization and comparison of the impact on ecosystem service provision of land-use scenarios under rubber plantation and settlement expansion. The results show the capacity of current (2020) and future land-use patterns to provide locally relevant ecosystem services, indicating a decline in capacity of ecosystem service provisioning in the future compared to the 2020 land-use patterns, a threat to the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. This highlights urgent need for policies and measures to control the drivers of land-use/land-cover change. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of diversifying land-use/land-cover types for sustainable landscape development. The paper contributes new insights into how spatially explicit and semi-quantitative methods can make stakeholder perceptions of landscape dynamics explicit as a basis for implementing integrated landscape approaches.

A framework to assess landscape structural capacity to provide regulating ecosystem services in West Africa.

The Sudanian savanna landscapes of West Africa are amongst the world's most vulnerable areas to climate change impacts. Inappropriate land use and agriculture management practices continuously impede the capacity of agricultural landscapes to provide ecosystem services (ES). Given the absence of practical assessment techniques to evaluate the landscape's capacity to provide regulating ES in this region, the goal of this paper is to propose an integrative assessment framework which combines remote sensing, geographic information systems, expert weighting and landscape metrics-based assessment. We utilized Analytical Hierarchical Process and Likert scale for the expert weighting of landscape capacity. In total, 56 experts from several land use and landscape management related departments participated in the assessment. Further, we adapted the hemeroby concept to define areas of naturalness while landscape metrics including Patch Density, Shannon's Diversity, and Shape Index were utilized for structural assessment. Lastly, we tested the reliability of expert weighting using certainty measurement rated by experts themselves. Our study focused on four regulating ES including flood control, pest and disease control, climate control, and wind erosion control. Our assessment framework was tested on four selected sites in the Vea catchment area of Ghana. The outcome of our study revealed that highly heterogeneous landscapes have a higher capacity to provide pest and disease control, while less heterogeneous landscapes have a higher potential to provide climate control. Further, we could show that the potential capacities to provide ecosystem services are underestimated by 15% if landscape structural aspects assessed through landscape metrics are not considered. We conclude that the combination of adapted land use and an optimized land use pattern could contribute considerably to lower climate change impacts in West African agricultural landscapes.

Assessment of the effects of forest land use strategies on the provision of ecosystem services at regional scale.

This paper presents results of a case study in Middle Saxony, Germany, where the impact of conversion, afforestation and alternatively introduction of short rotation coppice areas on the provision of ecosystem services was tested in a spatially inexplicit and a spatially explicit way to formulate recommendations for regional planning. While the spatially inexplicit testing did not lead to clear results regarding to what degree forests or short rotation coppice areas are desirable and applicable, the spatially explicit testing revealed that an increase in the forest area or area with short rotation coppice by 29.7% in unstructured agriculturally dominated Loess regions, 14.4% in more topographically structured parts in the North-East of the model region and 23.6% in its mountainous parts would be beneficial. Potentially resulting losses in the provision of bioresources and regional economy can be considerably reduced by replacing afforestation areas with short rotation coppice. In summary, we found that the spatially explicit analysis of land use scenarios in combination with a more detailed land use classification and including an assessment of changes in land use pattern gave us an improved basis for assessing different possible planning strategies and to enhance the communication between forest management planners and regional planners.

Regionalisation of climate change sensitive forest development types for potential afforestation areas.

This paper describes how to use sectoral planning information from forestry to predict and up-scale information on Climate Change sensitive forest development types for potential afforestation areas. The method was developed and applied in the frame of the project RegioPower with focus on the case study region 'Oberes Elbtal-Osterzgebirge'. The data for our study was taken from forest management planning at level of the Federal State of Saxony, Germany. Here, a silvicultural system is implemented, which describes best practices to develop our actual forests into Climate Change adapted forest development types. That includes the selection of drought resistant tree species, a broad range of tree species mixtures per eligible forest development type and the tending, harvesting and regeneration strategies to be applied. This information however, exists only for forest areas and not for areas which could be potentially afforested. The eligibility of the forest development types within the actual forest areas depends on site information, such as nutrient potential, exposition and hydrological soil parameters. The regionalisation of the forest development types to landscape scale had to be based on topographical parameters from the digital elevation model and hydrological soil parameters from soil mapping. In result, we could provide maps for regional planning and decision making with spatially explicit information on the eligible forest development types based on forest management planning information. These maps form a valuable input for testing and optimising afforestation areas with regard to improving the ability of our case study region to mitigate Climate Change effects such as water erosion or drought.